Ed Liebrecht
Conductor
Photos by Olivia Da Costa
‘It is a privilege to work with
such a thoughtful,
perceptive musician’
- Peter Sheppard Skaerved
such a thoughtful,
perceptive musician’
- Peter Sheppard Skaerved
AboutEd is a conductor, a jazz musician, a pianist, a singer, a researcher, a writer and a teacher. Also a determined advocate of new music and of new ways of making music, his influences are many and varied and he is committed to bringing that ideological variety into everything he does as a conductor.
|
ConductorEd is increasingly active as a conductor in the United Kingdom and in The Netherlands. He studies with Jac van Steen, Ed Spanjaard and Kenneth Montgomery, alongside his work assisting conductors around The Netherlands and Europe, including with orchestras such as the Residentie Orkest, Belgian National Orchestra, Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonie ZuidNederland, Noord Nederlands Orkest, Asko | Schönberg and Ensemble Kontraste. Ed is particularly interested in European and American music from the 20th and 21st Centuries, as well as collaborations with artists from various jazz and pop genres. Ed is the founder of two successful orchestras, Oxfordshire Festival Orchestra and Gustav Mahler Orchestra, both of which pair performances of new music with more well-known works. His investment in contemporary classical music and jazz informed his studies as a conductor at the Royal Academy, where he completed his masters with Head of Conducting Sian Edwards in 2021, graduating with Distinction and receiving the Fred Southall Prize for his final recital.
|
Research and Arrangements
Ed teaches Analysis and Musicology at the University of Cambridge. His analytical interests are in 20th and 21st Century European and American music. His research on analysing improvised jazz will shortly be published, and other work includes papers on Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony, Mahler’s 10th and a historical-philosophical investigation into Das Lied von der Erde. He is currently working on papers on disciplinarity, musical phenomenology, English music and the role of conductors in societal and sociological discourse.
As an arranger Ed makes reductions of large scale works for chamber orchestra. Among these are the Ruckert-Lieder and Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder for chamber orchestra, a re-orchestration of Heinrich Biber's Battalia a 10 for the same forces as Copland's Appalachian Spring, and his own completion of Mahler's 10th Symphony for a Beethoven-sized orchestra. Ed teaches academic music, piano, trumpet, music theory and conducting. For more about tuition, see here. |